1,200 years later, is Chinese poetry entering a new golden age?

Among
them was an IT guy who wanted their help testing out a new app for a
social network — not based on sharing friends, photos or business
contacts, but about sharing poetry. He convinced them to each recite some of their work.

Yibing Huang recorded his poem, "Shoulder to Shoulder We…" into
an app called "Poem For You." According to Yibing, the poets were
skeptical. They weren’t “app” kind of guys. Was this really a good venue
for poetry, they wondered? But, within minutes of the poets uploading
their poems, he says, “there were hundreds of people 'liking' them and
writing comments.”

Hundreds of ‘likes’ within minutes. In the US, where poetry can
feel like the exclusive domain of MFA grads and disaffected teens, I
would never say to someone, “If you really want to understand America,
read some modern poetry.” But in today’s China, where it seems like everyone is writing poetry, that might be just the thing to do.

"Maybe you hear a poet like Zheng Xiaoqiong, who’s going to read a
poem she wrote when she was a migrant worker in Southern China," says Jonathan Stalling, editor of Chinese Literature Today,
of the scene at a typical reading. "She’ll be talking about the
vulnerable bodies of her co-workers, dancing like dust in the afternoon
sun, reflecting off the machinery on the factory floor. The next poet
could be Luo Ying, the pen name of Huang Nubo, who’s one of the most
wealthy men in China and writes poetry from the point of view of a
capitalist.”

As in other spheres, the Internet has proven a huge democratizing
force in the world of Chinese poetry, leveling the playing field for
migrant workers and millionaires alike. But love of verse was already
there. Chinese poetry has 2,000 years of tradition at its back. Parents
read it to their babies.

Kids study it in school. But the thing is, most
Chinese believe poetry peaked in the Tang Dynasty.

That ended more than 1100 years ago. So for today’s poets, their chosen art form’s exalted status can feel like a double-edged sword.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, new poetry is dead in China,’” poet Ming Disays.
She loves the ancient poets, but feels the strict classical forms they
pioneered tended to dead end after, you know, a few hundred years.

“Poets in the Tang Dynasty already did their best. And we in 21st
Century have to do something new — either we bring something new to the
old form or go our own way.”

And they are. Modern Chinese poets are exploring radical new terrain
when it comes to form, sentence structure, and perhaps most importantly,
subject matter. At the far end of this spectrum, according to professor
Heather Inwood, is the "School of Rubbish." (Although, she says, “you can also translate it as the 'Trash School,' or something like that.”)

Poets Mo Mo and Yu Jian reveal a commemorative plaque at the the First Lushan New Century Famous Poets Summit. Credit:Heather Inwood

Inwood teaches Chinese cultural studies at the University of Manchester in England and is the author of "Verse Going Viral,"
a book about China’s new media scenes. "The 'School of Rubbish' became
famous for writing poems about, basically, bodily excretions," she
explains. "Their goal was to go one meter lower than the 'lower body' —
that was the name of an earlier poetry group around the turn of the
millennium that wrote about sex. So they were thinking, ‘If we can’t
write about sex because that’s already been done, what can we write
about that will open people’s eyes to new ways of thinking about
poetry?’”

And the answer was: Poems with a toilet theme. Of course, not everyone is convinced this is a hallmark of literary progress.

“People have argued … modern or contemporary Chinese poetry has not
completely found its own legitimacy," says Yibing Huang. "Some people
say, ‘Is this a poem?’ You know, ‘This morning, I woke up. I drank a cup
of coffee… Life sucks.’ People say that’s not a poem because it doesn’t
rhyme. It doesn’t fit a certain expectation.”

Yet, social media may be turning the tide. This past January, WeChat,
a messaging and social networking app, produced an unlikely media
darling whose poems don’t rhyme and don’t avoid the fact that, yeah,
sometimes life sucks. Yu Xiuhua had two books come out in one week and
sell out overnight — 15,000 copies.

In addition to being a poet, Yu is also a farmer from a rural village
who was born with cerebral palsy.

As Ming Di points out, “Some people
even consider her [to be the] Emily Dickinson in China.’”

Ming has translated some of Yu Xiuhua’s poetry, including her most famous poem, "Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You."

To spend or to be spent, what’s the difference if there is any?Two bodies collide — the force, the flower opened by the force,and the virtual Spring brought by the flower — nothing more than this,and this we mistake as life restarting.In half of China, things are happening: volcanoeserupt, rivers run dry,political prisoners and displaced workers are abandoned,elk deer and red-crowned cranes get shot.I cross the hail of bullets to sleep with you.I press many nights into one morning to sleep with you.I run across many of me and many of me run into one to sleep with you.Of course I can be misguided by butterfliesand mistake praise as Spring,and a village similar to Hengdian as home.But all these are absolutereasons that I spend a night with you.

It’s hard not to feel good about social networks like WeChat if
they can launch a woman like Yu Xiuhua into literary celebrity. And WeChat recently
debuted a new program where every evening at 10pm it publishes a poem
read by a “daily guest,” including luminaries like China’s first lady,
Peng Liyuan. WeChat’s goal for the project is to help people “develop
a deeper understanding of life.” Hard to imagine Twitter doing that.

Recently a popular Beijing anchor read "Shoulder to Shoulder We..."
one of Yibing Huang’s poems on WeChat. Yibing is thrilled about the
exposure the Internet brings him. But what is this all this doing to Chinese poetry?

“In a way I would say there is a danger in contemporary Chinese
poetry,” Yibing says. “There is a kind of intellectual laziness. Taking
poetry more for its entertainment value or eyeball effect.”

Social media has ensured there’s a lot more poetry out there, but
Yibing argues it also makes the good stuff harder to find. How many
microblog posts do you really want to scroll through to get your poetic
fix? True that, but I wonder if purists are also miffed because they
believe poetry is supposed be difficult — and a little out of reach. For
this crowd, clickability has taken away some of poetry’s luster, and
that’s unlikely to change. But as a vehicle for enjoyment, poetry has
always been more unicycle than bullet train. Even the simplest poem
requires a lot more of us than settling back to watch a movie.

The Internet isn’t going to kill poetry, people deciding it’s not
worth that effort will. And that doesn’t seem likely to happen in China
anytime soon.